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Painfully obvious truthsPainfully obvious truthsPosted Feb 26, 2013 9:12 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Painfully obvious truths by mathstuf Parent article: Mozilla announces 18 carriers supporting Firefox OS The user base for StatCounter is probably quite different than for the Ars Technica article. For starters, the author of the article you link is "a Microsoft Contributor at Ars"; I am not surprised that he would manage to find good numbers for IE. Anyway, what matters for the argument is the tendency in market share: Firefox is dwindling while Chrome is improving.
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Painfully obvious truths Posted Feb 26, 2013 16:16 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
And the difference in user base is what I want to know. Does SC ignore business? Does NM not count enough on Facebook? There's *quite* a difference and I'd like to know why. If it's bias, fine, but it'd still be interesting to see how that bias is being made.
In any case, the comments on his articles have indicated that he's actually pretty rough on Microsoft, not a blind follower (I don't read a lot of his stuff; mostly just the ones about changes to the dev environment since I use it at work).
The numbers Are has gotten over time showed Chrome catching Firefox, but both have pretty much flat lined in the past few months.
Painfully obvious truths Posted Feb 26, 2013 18:52 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> the author of the article you link is "a Microsoft Contributor at Ars"; I am not surprised that he would manage to find good numbers for IE
While I agree that different websites can have vastly different distributions of browsers I am disappointed in your unsupported assertion that just because someone writes news about Microsoft that they have lied about the browser distribution numbers. I think Ars has a little more journalistic integrity than that. I know it is fashionable to make these kind of serious accusations in a completely off-hand manner but it provides a confusing and inaccurate picture of the world, making it more difficult to pick out and recognize the real biases, by using rational, logical thought.
I wish more people learned rhetoric so that they were better equipped to spot BS and didn't fall back to using such inaccurate methods.
Painfully obvious truths Posted Feb 26, 2013 19:24 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Sorry to have offended your sense of (journalistic?) integrity, but really? If people did indeed learn rhetoric they might spot a glaring appeal to authority in your comment, and that is the whole basis of your analysis. You give no explanation about the biases; in fact you make it look like Ars data might be accurate while StatCounter might be off.At the very least you may look at some other independent market share analysis, from the first page of Google results for browser market share: Wikimedia foundation, w3schools, Clicky. None of them are even close to the ones from NetMarketshare. To answer another commenter, apparently there is a big difference in methodology between NetMarketshare and StatCounter. Personally I think that the methodology of NetMarketshare is atrocious; basing your research on the CIA factbook to make up for missing data looks like a bad idea. The discrepancy would mean that IE users surf the net about 3 to 4 times less than Chrome users, which is odd and a bit demeaning. Picking NetMarketshare data to report looks like a pro-Microsoft bias at best (from Ars or from the reporter), and plain old ignorance at worst. If you have any other enlightening views about why the bias, please let us know. Finally, given that I was talking about dwindling Firefox market share, which is confirmed by all sets of data, this is a very unnecessary discussion, entertaining as it may be.
Painfully obvious truths Posted Feb 26, 2013 20:56 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Thanks for the links; they're some interesting reading. I'll have to send an email to Ars asking why they use NetMarketshare (and maybe do a piece comparing them with StatCounter). The weighting based on the CIA factbook seems, to me, to indicate that IE is used more heavily in less connected countries (since they get pulled up). And yes, it is weird to weight your data, but, IMO, no less weird than just ignoring missing data (which would seem to be what SC does). At least they both are
> If you have any other enlightening views about why the bias, please let us know.
I suppose if and when Ars does a NM/SC comparison article would help with this.
> Finally, given that I was talking about dwindling Firefox market share, which is confirmed by all sets of data, this is a very unnecessary discussion, entertaining as it may be.
Well, seeing as my comment spawned this subthread, I agree that Firefox isn't looking strong in any of these datasets. I was more surprised at the difference between the stats I had seen before. Plus, it's not like I have much of a horse in the race as a developer of Uzbl (which will forever be relegated to a fraction of "Other").
Painfully obvious truths Posted Feb 26, 2013 21:03 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> ...indicate that IE is used more heavily in less connected countries...
This makes sense. IE is already on the machine, Firefox (or any other browser) will need bandwidth (i.e. time) to download.
If you don't really need it, and surfing the web is slow and painful in any case, why bother?
Painfully obvious truths Posted Feb 26, 2013 21:03 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> I suppose if and when Ars does a NM/SC comparison article would help with this.
They usually compare the third party aggregate stats with their own site stats which are often wildly different, much less IE, way more Firefox.
Painfully obvious truths Posted Feb 26, 2013 23:15 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
OK, I'm replying at the bottom of this thread in the hope that most of you subscribed to notifications all get this reply.
Most of the time you see 2 organisations quoted in news articles for statistics.
gs.statcounter.com and marketshare.hitslink.com
hitslink always has a much higher IE-share than statcounter, there are several reasons for that that I know of:
1. hitslink seems to be on more business oriented, IE is bigger in business than at home (just look at statcounter and compare the numbers for weekday and weekend).
2. IE is still bigger in China than in western countries. The country with the largest share of Windows XP is also China I believe. Probably Google isn't such a household name in China as their searchengine does not have a large share. A large part of Chrome users are Chrome users because of Google advertising and them being a household name. The reason China is significant for the statistics is because hitslink mangles their statistics based by adding a weight based on the number of people in a country. And China is a really large country.
3. statcounter measures by pageviews and hitslink counts by 'visit' (per session of pageviews). IE users are the 'dumber' users, users that don't know alternatives exist or how to install new software. My guess is these are users which visit a whole lot less pages per website. Chrome and Firefox users click much faster thus visit more pages.
Counting the missing Posted Feb 26, 2013 22:44 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Well, that explains it. I would argue that counting the browsers of people who don't browse is useless and even misleading. But ignoring missing data which you don't have and you don't really know how much it is worth, is wise. It would be like trying to guess what browser would have all those people that do not have computers, if they bought computers -- and adding them to the stats.
Counting the missing Posted Feb 26, 2013 23:07 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I suppose I should have been more clear: it's weird in the sense that there are no error bars on anything. One tries to compensate for the missing data errors while the other says "what we have is good enough". Neither approach is fundamentally good or bad under difference circumstances. SC has a much larger base versus NM based on site counts, so NM has to make up the difference somehow to make as strong an argument.
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